ARMH: Pondering the 64-Bit Server Future

By Tiernan Ray

ARM Holdings (ARMH) director of marketing Ian Thornton was in town today and was kind enough to stop by the Barron’s offices. We talked a bit about one of the next substantial frontiers for the company and its partners, 64-bit memory addressing, which is most likely to show up in server and equipment products, although Thornton also had some thoughts on 64-bit in mobile devices, which you can read in an earlier post.

ARM’s 64-bit architecture is coming with the “Cortex A50” series, which now exists in microprocessor designs designated “A53″ and “A57.” To give you a sense of the timeline, licenses started to be signed with partners two years ago, and ARM has only lately “taped out” its first microprocessor designs. “They’ve gotten to the Verilog stage, but they’re not quite at the Netlist stage at this point,” says Thornton.

That would imply first samples of chips from partners sometime toward the end of this year, with volume production in 2014, notes Thornton.

The leading partners signed so far are startup Calxeda, ST-MicroelectronicsNV (STMPR), Broadcom (BRCM), SamsungElectronics (005930KS), and the semiconductor design unit of China’s Huawei, which makes equipment in addition to mobile devices.

There will be a cost and a power savings from the up-front price of these devices as well as the performance they enable in servers and equipment, said Thornton. At this point, though, it’s difficult to quantify all that relative to Intel (INTC) Xeon server processors or Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Opteron parts because none of the partners has produced a part yet. X86 rules the majority of volume of server shipments today. (Mind you, AMD is also in the ARM camp, see below.)

One can make an analogy to Intel‘s “Atom” chip for mobile devices, in comparison to ARM-based smartphone chips based on the “Cortex A9” style parts. Atom takes three times the number of transistors to implement functional blocks that perform similar workloads, a sign of being less efficient than ARM-based designs, for example, contends Thornton. And the Intel x86 architecture uses the “variable length instruction word” approach, making it harder to streamline aspects of what are “monolithic” server processors, in his words.

But “that’s just an analogy,” and not really a fair comparison until 64-bit silicon appears, says Thornton.

His larger point about the competition between Intel and AMD and ARM partners is that the Intel server world is monolithic in its overall approach.

“Today, in some cases, you’ve got just 10% of Xeon being used” in a server, contends Thornton, because the bottleneck is in other parts of the system. If, for example, a server is doing streaming video, and it is mostly passing through bits from an external memory system, then between the time waiting for those bits to come off of a wire, and sending them out to the Internet, the microprocessor itself may not have a lot of work to do.

That, says Thornton, suggests that it may be possible for the entire collection of partners — there are 17 licensees of 64-bit ARM, and parties such as Nvidia (NVDA) have talked about getting into servers in a big way — could provide specialized parts that fit the job for different kinds of servers.

“It’s almost like an application-specific integrated circuit [ASIC],” quipped Thornton, although in that sense it seems more like an “application specific standard product [ASSP],” I suggested, though in reality such a system-on-a-chip(SOC) might not really be either.

Of course, there remain those niggly little details: Software. That huge chunk of the server market running on x86 still uses a lot of legacy applications, such as back-office financial software, even though some workloads have shifted to newer Internet-style applications. Thornton says that when customers tell large application providers such as SAPAG (SAP) or Oracle (ORCL) that they want to run their apps on an ARM-based server, the natural response from the software giants might be “What’s in it for me?” when it comes to all the expense involved in porting software to ARM.

Still, he thinks that “eventually everyone comes together to do what’s right for the industry,” which, in ARM’s view, includes moving to ARM processors, obviously.

Notes Thornton, there is the open-source software project calledLinaro, involving upward of 200 engineers from ARM and its partners, that is helping to standardized Linux for ARM in a variety of contexts, including networking and other equipment.

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MARCH 25, 2013 3:37 P.M.

your editor wrote:

"65-bit silicon" - oops, you added an extra bit there...

MARCH 25, 2013 3:40 P.M.

Ken Luskin wrote:

AMD and ARM Collaborate to Build 64-bit ARM-based Processors

AMD Changes Compute Landscape: First to Deliver both x86 and ARM Processors for the Data Center

On October 29, 2012, AMD announced it will design 64-bit ARM® technology-based processors in addition to its x86 processors for multiple markets, starting with cloud and data center servers.

Just as AMD introduced the industry’s first mainstream 64-bit x86 server solution with the AMD Opteron™ processor in 2003, AMD will be the only processor provider bridging the x86 and 64-bit ARM ecosystems to enable new levels of flexibility and drive optimal performance and power efficiency.

AMD is uniquely positioned to offer the most flexible and complete processing solutions for the modern data center based on the company’s deep 64-bit processor knowledge, years of server development experience, and industry-leading AMD SeaMicro Freedom™ supercompute fabric.

AMD’s first ARM-based server CPU is targeted for production in 2014.

“AMD is an innovation leader,” said Warren East, chief executive officer, ARM. “They are listening to customers’ demands for lower cost, more energy efficient compute. By collaborating with ARM, AMD is able to leverage its extraordinary portfolio of IP, including its Freedom Supercompute fabric, with our 64-bit ARM cores to build industry-transforming CPU solutions.

HP Logo "As part of HP's Pathfinder Program, AMD and HP are continuing their decade long relationship to innovate power-efficient computing with the development of a rich ecosystem of highly energy efficient, dense server technology.” said Paul Santeler, vice president and general manager, Hyperscale Business Unit, Industry Standard Servers and Software, HP.

Redhat Logo “The ecosystem for hyperscale computing is starting to take shape as workloads quickly evolve. Red Hat and AMD have been at the forefront of this movement, and today we are announcing our collaboration efforts to support the next-generation ARM-powered 64-bit architecture, ARMv8,” said Jon Masters, Chief ARM Architect, Red Hat.

MARCH 25, 2013 3:42 P.M.

Sam Sawyer wrote:

Ask the ARM guys, where is server virtualization for ARM based products? Without server virtualization ARM based servers will be relegated to niche applications or run with very low utilization, just like x86 based servers before virtualization became commonplace.

MARCH 25, 2013 3:47 P.M.

Tiernan Ray wrote:

Your Editor: Thank you for pointing that out. That is the next technology threshold, 65-bit.

MARCH 25, 2013 3:48 P.M.

Tiernan Ray wrote:

Ken Luskin: Yes, the article has been updated to reflect AMD's participation in 64-bit ARM.

MARCH 25, 2013 4:18 P.M.

Anonymous wrote:

64-bit ARM server is easier talking than making. Who is manufacturing the CPU: TSM, Sammy, GF and at what cost? Yes, they can make it, but the customer might not like price tag when comparing to the x86 CPU. Intel has the capacity to flood the market with low node x86 CPU in high volume and indirectly kill the competition.

MARCH 25, 2013 5:18 P.M.

Mauritz Nordlund wrote:

I dont get the fuss about 64bit ARM. ARM already have 38bit memory addressing breaking the "4gig" barrier. Sure: An idividual program cant use more then 4 gig, but the system can have 64gig.

On the other hand: PPC moved to 64bit in 1995 with UltraSparc. We saw real world huge gains going from 32bit to 64bit back then. On X86/PC there where no gains in speed going to 64bit. Actually its 3% less performance with Windows 64bit then 32bit. Only if a single program use more then 4 gig you will see speed gains. The reason is that X86 uses 64bit extensions to a 32bit instruction CPU. That is a problem with having X86 backward compatible to 1970.

ARM don't have that problem. They will use real 64bit processors. Maybe we will see same huge gains that we saw back in 1995 with UltraSparc.

X86 is destined to be a niche architecture/chip, just like SPARC, PPC, PARISC an so on. Intel were never the best /fastest chip. But it was cheap and good enough. To bad that Intel falls victim for the same against ARM. ARM is much cheaper and is fast enough. RISC is always better then CISC.

MARCH 25, 2013 6:05 P.M.

Warren East's empty office wrote:

Intel is late to the mobile dance. How about ARMH being 30 years too late to the server market. Lots of luck, you'll need it!

MARCH 26, 2013 12:03 P.M.

Anatoly Konukhov wrote:

As far as lack of software is concern there are other ways of solving this problem rather then porting soft to ARM. Qemu allows running x86 soft on ARM directly. Moreover Eltechs is developing high performance engine for running x86 applications on ARM so there will virtually be no difference in running one type of software or another on ARM chips.

The recent growth of data-intensive mobile devices and rise of cloud companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon has driven a major shift in the types of workloads run in large cloud data centers. Now much of the emphasis is on many light computing tasks with lots of parallelism and frequent use of large amounts of data. Furthermore, the energy efficiency of each processor is rapidly growing more important. These trends have led to ARM chip adoption in the datacenter. Last year ARM announced 64-bit designs for servers, so in the next year when ARM licensees start producing the processors, big things should happen in the data center.
This presentation will detail the latest in ARM server design, share some of the initial comparison data between ARM and incumbent server platforms, discuss the shifting ecosystem supporting the changing market trends, and preview the changes coming to ARM v8.

About Tech Trader Daily

Tech Trader Daily is a blog on technology investing written by Barron’s veteran Tiernan Ray. The blog provides news, analysis and original reporting on events important to investors in software, hardware, the Internet, telecommunications and related fields. Comments and tips can be sent to: techtraderdaily@barrons.com.